An open letter to Aberdeen City Council

It has been well documented that there is a problem with Aberdeen City Council and their approach to Smart City and Open Data in particular. See these posts, these requests and this github page from a project at CTC11, where we tried to help fix things. Today, a Finnish researcher on Smart Cities posted this on Reddit! International reputation? What international reputation!

Now it appears that in the relaunch last week of the Aberdeen City Council website, the council has ditched masses of content. This includes the city-wide What’s On which was until recently the most heavily-used part of the council website and which provided an extremely useful community resource.

More digging – well Googling of some popular terms for council website content and functions – returns nothing but 404 errors. See the list below for some examples.

When, in 2006 when when the site last underwent a major update, the small team took just six months on the transition, beginning to end. No content was lost or broken, and with URL rewriting and redirects they ensured that everything worked on day one.

The council have been working on the current relaunch – on and off as managers were swapped around or were dispensed with – for two years! And the mess of the site, with massive holes in content and functionality, far outweighs the much-improved look and feel.

So, what is the plan to restore content, much of which is a matter of public record?

We, as tax-payers, have paid for the creation of functionality and information which is of significant public use. So, where has it gone?

Maybe someone would care to make an FOI request to the city council – to ask what data the decision-making on transfer of content and functionality was based on, and get a copy of the website stats for the last three months? I think they are fed up of me.

Ian

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Ian Watt

Ian Watt is a co-founder of Code The City and of ODIAberdeen. He has recently been leading the Open Data programme for the 7 cities of Scotland. he is a fellow of SOCITM, and of the ILM. He was vote the UK's Local Government Digital Leader in 2013. You can contact Ian at http://twitter.com/watty62
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